Getting your head around approach anxiety

Dealing with Approach Anxiety

If the thought of going up to a woman and talking to her, let alone experiencing any kind of success, does not just seem far off but fills you with fear, you may have approach anxiety.

Approach anxiety is a sizeable barrier to finding love and only tackling it head on will lead to any change.

A lot of approach anxiety comes from insecurity, and putting your encounters on too high a pedestal. Over-rationalising the scenario and finding reasons not to speak to a girl will only deprive you of some great social and sexual experiences.

It’s also selfish – women love hearing how beautiful they are, and you’re letting your fear stand in the way of that.

I’m going to break this down in two halves for you.

WHY DO YOU HAVE APPROACH ANXIETY?

You might be rejected.

You don’t have much experience.

You’re not prepared or ready to go over.

You’ll run out of things to say.

It’s evolutionary.

WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT IT?

Talk to at least five girls you don’t fancy

Make a bet with your mates

Make approaches daily

Frame rejection differently

Do the best for yourself outside of approaching women

WHY DO YOU HAVE APPROACH ANXIETY

You might be rejected.

Well, duh. If you’re talking to the right number of women, you should be getting rejected – hundreds of times a week.

Men are proud creatures, and some really cannot handle the thought of a woman not wanting to sleep with them.

Maybe past events have shaped that fear of the humiliation or embarrassment you think is going to come with a rejection. You may be thinking ‘do attractive guys get rejected?’ and worrying that you don’t meet these imaginary standards.

Approach anxiety is practically a phobia – it’s grounded in an irrational fear of rejection. If you turn down every chance to talk to a woman thinking “what if they react badly, why are women so irrational?” just stop. You’re the irrational one.

Honestly what’s the worst that can happen? She’ll say no?

You don’t have much experience.

You have approach anxiety because you don’t have much experience, and you don’t have much experience because you have approach anxiety. It’s a vicious cycle.

Part of the joy my clients feel in working out how to get over approach anxiety is the harvesting of new experiences, the likes of which they never thought they were capable.

So yes, you don’t have much experience. But even just a little confidence and a few positive experiences can start off a much greater chain reaction.

You’re not prepared or ready to go over.

Maybe you’re at the shops after work, you’re sweaty, tired, and grumpy, and you see an insanely beautiful woman to whom every cell in your body is screaming at you to talk.

If you’ve got approach anxiety, ‘not being prepared’ is aiding and abetting the problem. Perhaps you feel you’re not dressed right, or you’re not wearing your favourite aftershave, and you’re using that an excuse not to go over.

You’ll run out of things to say.

You might be the quiet type, or interested in a thing that not many people talk about.

Either way, perhaps you’re concerned that she won’t find you interesting or enjoy talking to you. We’ll come to handling that in just a moment. But there are very easy ways to keep a dialogue rolling.

It’s evolutionary

An important point to make is that you will never fully lose approach anxiety. It’s an evolutionary failsafe to protect our psyche from potentially harmful encounters.

There are, however, ways to rationalise the process of talking to women that mean the anxiety is not all-empowering, and the anxiety is something that fuels you instead of hampers you.

WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT IT?

Talk to at least five women you don’t fancy

Pick-up artists commonly refer to these as ‘throwaway sets’, but that doesn’t mean you have to underplay those encounters or undervalue the women you speak to.

It’s the seduction equivalent of talking to people in the queue for a nightclub – practice rounds for positive social references. It’s great for your confidence and momentum to chat to people with no ulterior motive and have fun.

Once you’re limbered up, you can move onto the women you want to escalate with. Think of three reasons why you like a girl, and go up to her and let her know. Use the momentum you developed just talking to people.

Bet your wingman.

The point of a wingman is not to buffer your ego, but to give you the strength, encouragement and social flow to engineer a successful context for seduction.

That includes pushing you into approaches and constantly challenging your comfort zone. So use them as an insurance policy.

Place a wager with your wingman – for money – that you can’t talk to x number of girls in an hour. Make sure they hold you to it. And it doesn’t matter how many girls, but make sure you hit that target.

Whether you get anything but rejections or not, doing this once a week will chip away at that approach anxiety so that going up to a woman becomes natural.

Keep making approaches daily

If you make at least one approach every day, you’ll soon find it’s second nature.

Try and challenge yourself with different scenarios, places you wouldn’t normally chat to a girl like a petrol station or bank queue.

There is no ‘right’ place to talk to a girl for assured success. If you like a woman and let her know often enough, the repetition will become the key to overcoming approach anxiety. If it’s something you do every day, what’s there to be afraid of?

You’ll also find during this process that your techniques sharpen, and your body language becomes far more natural and comfortable, which won’t hurt your confidence one bit.

If you talk to one woman a month, and it doesn’t work out, you’ll put next month’s encounter on a pedestal. Make it a daily routine and watch the pedestal fall away.

Frame rejection differently

The most important gain from making a bulk of approaches is that you get to take a different stance on rejection.

The odds are, most men will be rejected at least once every time they go out. Do pretty girls get rejected? Sure they do. It’s merely a question of maths – there is a percentage of people you’re compatible with, and a percentage you’re not.

The rejection is never personal (how can it be, they just met you) but almost always gives you some useful feedback to take into the next encounter. To go home with a girl, your approach only technically needs to work once in a night.

Which means the rest of the times will be rejections, and you’ll simply have to face up to it if you’re going to get over approach anxiety.

Remember that as you blast through 10 encounters in an hour to hang on to the ton you just bet your wingman.

It’s important to take rejections in a fun light and never to let that encounter-to-encounter energy drop once you have it.

Build confidence and invest in yourself

You’re not going to feel like you’re worthy of your time, and that they should actually be auditioning for yours rather than the other way round, if you generally do nothing to better yourself.

Get regular exercise, eat in a way that doesn’t make you feel guilty, and use the time you spent going out to socialise instead of getting wrecked.

Really look at and address what can be improved about you. Your job sucks? Go get a new qualification. You’re out of shape? Hire a personal trainer. Take those steps to be the best you and regardless of how far you are along the path to success, you’ll feel much more deserving if your encounters.

Even though you were fully deserving of it the whole time.

Nobody’s perfect. Not you, not your mates or family, not the most beautiful girl at the bar. Treat every approach as a clean slate and give the best first impression you can.

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